An offline-first family road-trip game for collecting license plates, tracking where they came from, and scoring the distance traveled.
Plate Quest turns the familiar road-trip license plate game into a local-first browser game. Start a trip, let the device follow your location, and collect issuing jurisdictions as your team spots them. Each jurisdiction can be collected once per trip, with the game tracking plates, estimated distance, points, and completion.
The current build includes a North America collection map, searchable plate picker, U.S. plate artwork, automatic location updates during active trips, boundary-based distance scoring, sighting undo, local trip storage, offline caching, and JSON export. It runs entirely in the browser without accounts, a backend API, or a database.
Plate Quest grew out of the kind of game families already play in the car. The goal was not to replace that simple game with a complicated system; it was to make keeping score, recognizing plates, and seeing how far a find traveled more interesting without requiring an account or constant connection.
That also made it a good fit for Signal Foundry: a small game built because we wanted it for ourselves, designed around a real situation where offline support and straightforward mobile controls matter.
Distance is part of the game. Rather than treating every plate as identical, Plate Quest estimates how far the sighting is from the nearest boundary of its issuing jurisdiction and turns that distance into a balanced point score. A plate from nearby still counts; a genuinely far-traveled plate becomes a more valuable find.
The game is deliberately local-first. Trip and location data stay on the device unless the player exports them, and the application does not need user accounts or a server-side database.
Plate Quest is also explicitly passenger-first. The interface includes a road-trip safety reminder: the driver should keep their eyes on the road while a passenger handles the game.
The build log
Current work and future direction are separate. Planned and exploratory ideas are not promises or playable features.
Start a trip, locate the device, collect jurisdictions, score sightings, review the collection, and export local data.
Sightings use distance from the issuing jurisdiction boundary for scoring, with an undo path for mistakes.
Current work is focused on backup restore, production assets, trip summaries and history, testing, accessibility, privacy copy, and release engineering.
Achievements, competitive modes, cloud sync, shared live trips, broader plate artwork, and online statistics remain possible future directions.
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From the build log
Plate Quest took the familiar family license plate game and turned it into an offline-first browser experience with location-aware scoring, plate artwork, and continuous trip tracking.
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A fully playable browser word game that began with a very practical goal—helping one of Ben's kids improve their English grades.
